Jade Software has announced that it has completed a CRM transformation project at Pacific Islands Trade & Invest (PT&I), the region’s leading export facilitation, investment and tourism promotion agency.

PT&I is an arm of the Pacific Island Forum Secretariat based in Fiji and the only agency tasked by leaders to develop, grow and promote industry and business in all 14 Pacific Island countries. This includes export, investment, tourism and creative arts promotion across international markets.

The project made it faster and easier for PT&I staff from Geneva to Suva to view and update customer and contact information. Mobile support and cloud hosting improved user access, after Jade planned and performed a seamless data migration from PT&I’s legacy Microsoft Dynamics CRM environment.

As Chris Brimble, Knowledge and Information Manager, PT&I, explains, the organisation initially started using its incumbent CRM platform seven years ago. “CRMs out of the box are very sales focused, but we don’t make sales. We have a unique way of operating, so we customised our initial Dynamics instance to work for us.” But this was at a cost to the organisation. As new versions of Dynamics were introduced, PT&I missed out on the advantages of upgraded features, and support for their version of the software stopped.

The decision to upgrade the organisation’s CRM infrastructure and deploy a cloud-based solution followed consultation with Jade, who facilitated a stakeholder workshop to define PT&I’s business requirements.

“Jade understood the way that our organisation worked, and how our business processes could be translated to work in CRM. We wanted to simplify things,” says Brimble. Working with Jade’s expert, a solid plan took shape and PT&I decided to deploy a cloud-hosted instance of Dynamics CRM 2015.

Within two weeks, over 10,000 contacts were configured and migrated to the cloud in a clean install, with no data lost. At the same time, architecture changes within the CRM created a simplified workflow for users. Where multiple screens were required to create and update an account within the CRM, with Jade’s help, this has been reduced to a single screen to capture all required information.

An advantage of moving to the cloud is PT&I always being on the latest version of Dynamics. Changes made to the system were done using Microsoft’s framework, enabling auto-updates to keep the system current.

PT&I staff can now access the CRM online, on any device. Jade has also helped prepare training, too, so Brimble and his team can encourage wide usage of the new system across the Pacific and around the world.

“Our CRM platform is now much faster which is a real positive because the slowness of the old system was a huge barrier for people. It also looks a lot better than it used to, and it’s easier to navigate.”